(upbeat music)
- [Tony] Compound paths are used
when you want to cut a hole in something.
Think about the letter O.
That normally starts out
when you are designing a font as two shapes,
one larger ellipse with another smaller ellipse inside of it
and then the smaller ellipse
is punched out of the larger one, creating a hole.
Rather than talking about it though,
let's try it right now with the two squares
that we have here.
Now I want you to just make
a quick mental note of their fill
because that's going to change
when we make the compound path.
And we can do that either by using
the shortcut Command + eight or Control + eight
or going into the Object menu,
choosing Compound Path, and Make.
You can see that when we've done that,
we do have the hole from where the two were intersecting
and the background color
or the color of the object in the background
to be more accurate is the one
that's been passed to the compound path.
Now that means that both things will now change.
Whatever color we choose for these,
that will change like so.
It is essentially one path.
And let's come across to these targets just here
and what I'd like you to do,
and you could probably do this best by dragging,
is drag across the magenta, the yellow,
and the cyan path there like so.
Leave the black circle in the middle be just for the moment.
Okay, so we are going to make a compound path again,
so Object, Compound Path, and Make,
and you can see now it has punched out a hole
based on the shape in the middle.
Let's select all four shapes in the target below
and we'll do that again.
This time, let's use the shortcut
Command + eight or Control + eight
and you'll see something very different has happened.
Now you don't need to worry
too much about the technicalities of this,
but I'll show you how it actually can be made to work.
Let's go to the Window menu
and come down and find the Attributes panel,
and open that up.
Now we'll need to see the options for this,
so you can either click the small disclosure triangle
next to the word Attributes
or you can go to the fly out and choose Show options,
and this is what we are going to switch over to.
At the moment, we're using the fabulously named
Non-Zero Winding Fill Rule for this shape.
But if we turn on the Even-Odd Fill Rule,
then we suddenly get that shape punched out
because we have even, odd, even, odd,
and hopefully that makes sense to you.
So if you're getting a result
that isn't exactly what you were expecting,
then perhaps try that to see if it resolves it.
Now let's contrast a compound path with a compound shape.
Let's select the two squares at the top right here
and what we're going to do first
is use one of the Shapes mode pathfinders.
You'll see them here in the Properties panel.
We're going to use this one first of all.
We're just going to click it
and you'll see the two things are joined together,
and they take on the color of the top most object
and this just results in one path.
Select the two squares beneath that
and this time we're going to click the button again,
but we're going to hold down
the Alt or Option key when we do it
which will generate us a compound shape.
So the difference here is that
while the visual result is identical to the one above,
there's still actually two separate shapes.
If we go ahead and get our Group Selection tool
which lives under the Direct Selection tool
and click one of the shapes,
you can see we can move it around
and it just moves
and changes the results of the compound shape.
So there we are.
We have a compound path.
We have Pathfinder operation or Shapes mode operation.
You found out about the Non-Zero Winding Rule
and the Even-Odd Rule.
What I'd like you to do now
is to have a look at the two squares here
before you join them together using either the compound path
or the compound shape
and try and predict what the resulting color will be.
If not, just wind back a little bit
and review the options we've done so far.
We're going to explore everything
the Pathfinder panel has to offer us
and in many ways because it's the oldest,
it is the cornerstone of drawing by construction.
Now we do have access to the pathfinder
inside of the Properties panel.
As soon as you select two or more objects
then the Pathfinder will appear here,
but you have an ellipsis
to get through to the actual pathfinders.
So for this movie I'm going to go ahead
and open up the Pathfinder panel
and then just park that somewhere
where it's not too much in the way.
And as luck would have it, there is about fine.
So the first one of these is Unite
and if we click, the two shapes are joined together.
Alt or Option clicking on any of the Shape modes
gives you a compound shape
in which it's still editable.
The second option, Minus Front,
does pretty much exactly what it says.
It will knock the front object out of the back object.
So if I just go ahead and click that,
there's the result just there.
Intersect kind of speaks for itself.
It would be the area that is common to both
and Exclude is the opposite.
It's the stuff that isn't intersecting
that will remain from that one.
So those are all pretty straightforward
for putting together shapes,
but the pathfinders do something just a little bit deeper.
So if we had a collection of shapes as we do here
and we actually wanted all of the little bits
that made that up,
we could use this one, the Divide pathfinder,
and that, like all other pathfinder results,
normally gives us a group.
And you can see that is the case
by looking at the Control strip
or top of the Properties panel.
So I'm going to ungroup this
and then you'll see if we move things away,
we've got all of the shapes that were there.
So everything that was in that group there,
wherever it's intersected or was sitting on
its own has been divided.
Sometimes very, very useful.
Trim is the next one.
So if we go ahead and choose Trim,
what happens there is it takes away any strokes.
Now again, it's a group as a result,
but it removes anything that's overlapping
and that's a useful one especially if you're doing things
like t-shirt design where you maybe want
just the actual areas
and no overlap themselves.
Or if you are cutting graphics on something like a Cricut,
you might want the individual shapes like so
so that again is very useful.
One I use quite a lot myself
because I do a lot of Live Paint operations is Merge,
and what Merge will do is it will merge common colors
and cut away others.
So let's go ahead and use this one.
So if we go Merge,
here again, the strokes are removed.
I'm just going to ungroup that, okay?
And then you'll see if I move this one away
that that's a separate object to this one,
but these two have been joined together.
Crop will pop everything that overlaps into the top object.
The result is, if you have a look at it here,
is looking very much like a clipping mask
although it's actually a done deal.
There's no additional content there,
but that's what's happened.
All of the overlapping areas have been kept,
as has the outside,
but that at the moment is transparent.
Outline, to be honest, I hardly ever, ever use this one,
but I'm sure that some people
have got a fantastic use for it.
But if we click it,
it's kind of like working with Divide here.
If I just ungroup this
so we can get into the different elements,
it gives us all of the component parts
but just as strokes here.
So you can see that we've got them,
but they've retained the color of their former fill.
And Minus Back will do the opposite
of a couple of the others
in which the back shapes will be punched out
and the result is just whatever remains of the top shape.
Now again, that's not one I use terribly often,
but I do use Crop quite a lot.
I use Merge quite a lot
and divide quite a lot as well.
All of the Shapes modes of course,
but you will find in your own work which is useful to you.
But now you know what they do,
you've got that knowledge
to be able to make those decisions.
The Shape Builder tool gives us a very interactive way
to draw using construction methods.
What we have here, as I'm sure you've guessed already,
is an owl constructed from just simple shapes
inside of Illustrator,
and what we're going to do is build this out.
We'll start out with the ear on the left-hand side here,
so we need to access the tool.
Shift + M gets this shape builder
and then we need a selection.
So let's select everything here, Command + A,
because it's just a single art board
in this document, so that's great.
Let's go ahead then and start in the ear
and click and drag through,
and you can see that Illustrator identifies
segments for it as it draws.
We'll go ahead and continue into the next ear like so.
Then let's go ahead
and make our way over to the sides here
because we need to subtract these ellipses.
This is where we hold down the Alt or Option key to click
and you'll see they're removed very quickly.
Let's zoom in on the bottom here
and build the feet.
Just drag in the sectors there as I'm doing to combine them.
So let's just go ahead and do that.
Takes just a moment or two.
Then we're going to subtract these triangles
from the shape at the bottom
to add a little character to the tail.
So Alt or Option key down
and then just click and drag
just to punch those out of the shape,
and you can see how effective that is
and how quickly we're managing to do that.
Let's pan upwards, you can hold down the space bar
of course to pan
and again, hold down the Alt or Option key,
but this time we're not aiming for one of the sectors.
We're aiming for a stroke just here.
You can see that
and how it highlights differently.
Click there, whoopsie daisy.
I think I just went into the whole shape,
so just click there and that shape is removed.
Now interestingly the eyes popped away there as well,
but we can simply resolve that by going ahead
and clicking into those without any keys held down.
And just a quick visual check here
and if we combine these two together, that's it.
I think we are about ready to go.
Let's do Command + zero
or Control + zero to fit the whole thing together
and we've drawn an owl
in just a couple of minutes using just shapes.
That's the Shape Builder.
It's a great tool to work with.
Try now building some shapes of your own
and seeing what you can make just with simple constructions
using the Shape Builder, have fun.
(upbeat music)